To Know What Death Is
by kanoafreespirit
Summary: The background of a renegade Shepard. Born on Mindoir, forged on Tenth Street, and honed on Elysium, this is an account of the events that make Shepard the man who will one day destroy the Reapers. This is the story of a man who discovers what death is.


To know what death is.

He'd been born 'n raised a colony brat on Mindoir. He had seen, experienced first hand, the brutality: the petrifying stench that was war during the raid of 2170.

He thought he knew what death was. It was horror

He had spent the next eight months in a foster home back on the human homeworld of Earth (how he hated that ball of rust and steel!). Ivan and Roxanna became his foster parents. Their tight smiles, sympathetic hands, big innocent eyes, and their dull, fashionable clothes. One year neon plastics, another tight synth-cotton pants and billowing shirts.

They had enrolled him in psychotherapy, but it was as fake as they were. How he had detested those visits, suffused with falsities. They didn't know, could never know. The rich 'social gatherings' of stuffy, boring, stupid people. The dignified elite, how he laughed at their ignorance. They had not seen _it._

So he left them. They undoubtedly looked for him, but Chicago was a large metropolis, and he soon learned how to move quickly without being noticed. He hated the false smiles and the insincere platitudes of the life he had left behind. In the bowls of the city, he found life, real living. On Tenth Street he met Finch, who had given him an old chemical and cartridge revolver, his first package, and directions to an abandoned flat. With the Reds he found a home that didn't ask about his feelings, about his past: a family that accepted him without trying to fix what wasn't broken.

Death was a common companion amoung the Reds, and he thought he knew what death was. It was drug-driven exhilaration.

He had been happy there, running odd packages to odd people, for close to a year. With his eighteenth birthday in just two months, he began dreaming about new places. Anyone who walked with their eyes open had seen the recruitment posters plastered across the concrete walls of Chicago. Strong men with piercing eyes and a proud smile, a glint in their eyes that reflected the possibilities of a hundred systems, a thousand worlds.

Under the loud cover of city-night, on the dawn of his birthday, he had crept out the door of the Red's communal apartment flat, slid down the gray streets (a color that could only be achieved mixing sleeping night and lazy morning), and slipped into the pristine white recruitment office with its blazing florescent light tubes. One physical and a physc eval later and he was a proud grunt of the Systems Alliance.

The physical turned up eezo nodules in his nervous system, and he was offered the new L3 biotic implant. A dozen papers signed in triplicate and several unread pamphlets later, he was a certified biotic. Undocumented his ass.

He was shipped to Titan for boot camp and Hostile Environment Assault Conditioning. On Saturn's largest moon he learned to fire any weapon handed to him from an avenger sniper to an M-50 grenade launcher, and unlocked the capabilities of his mind. He could put a bullet in someones eye from a mile away or crush them with his biotics.

Through info sessions and drills, he thought he knew what death was. It was clean, clinical, surgical.

Months went by training for battle. But when boot camp ended and he was handed his hard-won private arrow, he was assigned to Eden Prime; a worthless colonial planet that reminded him of his own homeworld of Mindoir. Everywhere he looked he saw ghosts of his abducted and massacred family and friends.

And he thought he knew what death was. It was lingering pain.

After a year drifting through dreary days and painful memories on the paradise planet of humanity, he was reassigned to the Carrier SSV Einstein in the Skyllian Verge. It was further on the fringe between established Alliance Space and the anarchistic Terminus System than his previous posting, and held the promise of battle. He was looking forward to some action. He had chosen the infiltrator specialization on Eden Prime (an odd decision for a biotic but deceptively lethal), and was looking forward to finally putting a few holes in some bad guys.

His opportunity finally came only two weeks later when their carrier was assigned a list of priority targets, moons, asteroids, and even a planet held by pirates that were raiding civilian shuttles in the area. On an unnamed, forsaken asteroid designated AX-54, half his squad, including the CO, was killed.

As he bent double like an old beggar, held the broken remains of his ragged friends with purple faces swollen like an overripe grape from decomp, he knew what death was. It was hell.

A month later, with a shaky phsych eval, he was given two weeks of leave on Elysium (to 'get your head on straight, soldier') before he was to join the crew of the SSV Agnicourt, a Frigate that patrolled the Petra Nebula.

Nine days into his leave, the Skyllian Blitz had begun.

The first wave of invaders had crushed any resistance and bombed out those that remained. Police and Military responders received a bullet to the brain, civis got a slave chip shoved into theirs.

The anti-aircraft guns were down in minutes. And that's when everything really went to shit. The gates of hell burst open, and hundreds of troop transports began landing, each carrying hundreds of raider where the earlier fighters had only carried a few dozen.

The streets of Elysium's capitol were swamped beneath a flood of Batarians, Turians, Krogan, and blood-traitor Humans, all armed with military grade assault rifles, rocket launchers, and flamethrowers. People were crushed-trampled-incinerated-liquified-massacred-enslaved before the rushing hounds of hell.

As he sniped down at the writhing hoard of flooding monstrosities from a crumbling rooftop that managed to weather the initial orbital bombing he knew what death is. It is that darkness which lives within the hearts of men. And John Shepard smiles.

For those of you who caught the reference to Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, internet cookies. (P.S. It's in one of the 'know what death is' lines)


End file.
